We consider the problem of how societies should be partitioned into classes if individuals express their views about who should be put with whom in the same class. A non-bossiness condition makes the social aggregator dependent only on those cells of the individual partitions the society members...

Employment contracts are often incomplete, leaving many responsibilities subject to workers’ discretion. High work morale is therefore essential for sustaining voluntary cooperation and high productivity in firms. We conducted a field experiment to test whether workers reciprocate wage cuts...

We study the role of reciprocity in a labor market field experiment. In a recent paper, Gneezy and List (2006) investigate the impact of gift exchange in this context and find that it has only a transient effect on long run outcomes. Extending their work to examine both positive and negative...

This note clarifies two issues in the context of Varian's (1994) model of sequential contributions to a public good. First, it is shown that private provision of a public good is not necessarily neutral with respect to income transfers when agents move sequentially rather than simultaneously....

What determines reciprocity in employment relations? We conducted a controlled field experiment to measure the extent to which monetary and nonmonetary gifts affect workers' performance. We find that nonmonetary gifts have a much stronger impact than monetary gifts of equivalent value. We also...